For at least the second time in as many months, CBC has admitted that it overstepped by presenting claims against Israel as fact, rather than simply as allegations.
On April 2, the broadcaster issued an on-air correction related to an earlier report, where a representative from Glia Equal Care, an anti-Israel activist group, falsely claimed that Israel had created a mass grave in Gaza. Upon being corrected by HonestReporting Canada, CBC acknowledged that “there is no substance to this claim.”
The next month, on May 29, CBC Ombudsman Maxime Bertrand addressed a report from April, 2025. In that article, “Why did Israel’s military kill 15 Palestinian aid workers in Gaza? The IDF’s story keeps changing,” Foreign Correspondent Chris Brown wrote that “in one of the deadliest incidents, in February 2025, the IDF killed 112 people waiting in a line up for flour in Gaza City.”
The article was written with files from Mohamed El Saife, CBC’s videographer in Gaza who has previously shared anti-Israel content on social media.
Following that article and after CBC declined to take corrective action, HonestReporting Canada filed an official complaint with the Ombudsman of Canada’s publicly-funded broadcaster, noting that regarding the incident in question, Israel strenuously denied that it killed 112 people lining up for flour, as they were killed as a result of a stampede that had taken place.
HonestReporting Canada added that “accordingly, an immediate correction is warranted by the CBC which is duty bound to retract its [false statement of April 8, 2025, claiming] that the ‘IDF killed 112 people waiting in a line up for flour in Gaza City.’”
In her response, Ombudsman Maxime Bertrand first noted that the article in question inaccurately stated that the event took place in 2025, when it had actually taken place in 2024.
More importantly, she agreed that “the wording used presents a deeply contested sequence of events as settled fact, without reflecting the conflicting accounts,” adding that “at the very least, the phrase should have been attributed to the United Nations, the only statement to which it could be reasonably ascribed.”
As Bertrand acknowledged in her review, that sentence represented a formal breach of CBC’s Journalistic Standards and Practices because it “oversimplified the situation and made a statement that could not be justified.”
Accordingly, CBC was compelled to publish a correction to this article and to amend its report.
Ther correction stated:
Corrections: This story has been updated to more accurately attribute descriptions of the February 2024 incident that killed at least 112 people. The date of the incident has also been corrected. Jun 01, 2026 5:57 PM EDT
Bertrand’s review and acknowledgement that Foreign Correspondent Chris Brown violated CBC’s journalistic standards is an important step in the right direction, demonstrating that Canada’s public broadcaster cannot simply regurgitate anti-Israel claims and present them as being factually correct.
Brown is no stranger to producing problematic news content, nor to having the Ombudsman correct his reporting. His writing has been repeatedly critiqued by HonestReporting Canada, and in a 2024 article, he falsely claimed that “the Israeli government has repeatedly refused international calls to negotiate the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.” Following HonestReporting Canada filing a formal complaint at the time, CBC admitted that his article was inaccurate.
In fact, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre used Twitter in 2024 to condemn CBC journalist Chris Brown for a post analyzing Israel’s assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. Poilievre accused the CBC of mourning a terrorist, while Brown’s original tweet had suggested that killing a key ceasefire negotiator served to deliberate derail peace talks.
Further to this latest recognition by CBC of Chris Brown’s inaccurate statement and problematic reporting, he is duty-bound to no longer present anti-Israel claims as unassailable fact.
